N. A. Sokolov was not deceived for an instant. If, supposing, the family had been removed, their death was, to him, none the less a moral certainty. He had precise information that every other member of the Romanov kin had been murdered, although they were just as unconcerned in politics as the boy Alexis and his sisters. But the evidence of eye-witnesses, coupled with and corroborated by countless material proofs, could leave no doubt as to the fact of a wholesale murder at Ekaterinburg. All the efforts of the organisers and the supineness of the earlier investigators could not completely tangle the threads. But it became a harder task to assemble the evidence that would secure a conviction in a Court of law.
I visited the house where the victims had lived. It belonged to a certain Ipatiev, a merchant who held the rank of captain in the Engineers. By one of the ironies of Fate he bore the name of the monastery whence the first Romanov sallied to assume the Crown of All the Russias. The Ipatiev of Ekaterinburg was, however, of Jewish origin.
The Engineer Department of the Siberian Army was installed in the upper story. Directly after the occupation of the city by the Czechs General Gaida had forcibly taken possession of the premises, despite the vehement protest of the judicial authorities, alarmed by the risk of losing possible clues. The rooms underwent extensive alterations. This was, of course, a flagrant violation of the most elementary principles of criminal investigation.
The lower floor was tenanted by Ipatiev himself, on the understanding that no strangers should be admitted. The small basement room—the scene of the murders—was sealed up. I saw it a few days later. Sokolov took me over the premises, explaining step by step the enactment of the tragedy. We stood in the little room, noted the trace of the bullets, the direction of the bayonet thrusts, and the splashes of blood on the walls. The room had been a shambles, and all the washing and scouring that, according to the evidence, had followed the murders could not remove tell-tale signs. We knew from the depositions of witnesses and the mute, gruesome language of the death-chamber where each of the victims sat or stood when the assassins fired their revolvers. The bullet-holes in the walls and in the floor had been carefully cut out; human blood had been found in the wood and on the bullets.
Obscene drawings and inscriptions covered the upper walls. Obviously they were the work of uncultured peasants. Their character showed only too clearly how deeply the conscience of the people had been revolted by the Razputin scandal. There were other inscriptions—in Hebrew, in German, in Magyar. Regarding them I was to learn much at a later date.
Soon afterwards I was in the woods, ten miles north of the city, where the peasants had found jewelry and other relics of the murdered family. I saw the tracks, still clear, of heavy lorries crashing through the trees to a group of disused iron-ore shafts. All went in one direction, ceasing near a pit round which a vast collection of clues had been discovered; precious stones, pearls, beautiful settings of gold and platinum, some hacked, broken, bearing traces of fire; metal buckles, hooks, buttons, corset-frames, pieces of charred leather and cloth, a human finger intact, a set of false teeth. The character, condition, and numbers of these various articles were in themselves sufficient to indicate the sex and ages of the victims and the manner in which their bodies had been disposed of.
First on the scene had been the peasants. For three days and nights they were cut off from the city by a cordon of Red Guards placed around the wood. Knowing that the Whites were at hand, they thought the Reds were burying arms. Vague rumours had reached them of the death of Nicholas II. As soon as the cordon had been removed they rushed to the spot. Woodcraft and native astuteness quickly opened their eyes. “It is the Tsar that they have been burning here,” they declared. On this very spot, a year later, I found topaz beads, such as the young Princesses wore, and other gems, by scratching the surface of the hardened clay surrounding the iron pit.
Led off on a false scent, the earlier investigator had neglected the unerring sagacity of the peasants and had even failed to make an immediate examination of the wood and pits—perhaps afraid to leave the city, because Red bands were reported to be in the neighbourhood. He was following the red-herring trailed by Soviet agents, that, to wit, the family had escaped or been removed. These agents did not know the truth themselves. They merely related what they had been instructed to say. The local Soviet had not known the facts. There had been no trial. The murders had been the work of a separate organization which directed everything from a distance. Misled by the versions thus spread, the investigator had lost himself in the maze of conflicting rumour in Ekaterinburg.
When Sokolov took over the case—in the early months of 1919—it was almost at a standstill because of the initial mistakes and incapacity of the investigator. Yet evidence had come from another quarter that should have compelled him to take the right course. From one of the Imperial servants who had escaped from a Red shooting squad it became known that several grand dukes and the Grand Duchess Elizabeth had been murdered immediately after the Ekaterinburg shooting, and that some of the bodies had been found in disused iron pits. In no case had there been any semblance of a trial. It was evident the wholesale extermination of the Romanovs had been pursued, and that all theories of the miraculous survival of the children should be abandoned.